


Mnemosyne

by whatthedruidscallme



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Love, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-07 20:51:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatthedruidscallme/pseuds/whatthedruidscallme
Summary: As years pass, Merlin writes letters to a man who's no longer alive to read them.





	Mnemosyne

Arthur,

I don’t know why I haven’t thought of doing this before. Someone I met an odd decade ago told me that when her husband died, she kept writing letters to him. She died recently, letters still piled up in a brass trunk full to the bursting at the foot of her bed. It’s taken me this long to commit to doing it.

She said she wrote to him whenever she felt like it, whatever she felt like. Sometimes they were love letters, sometimes they were grocery lists or other things besides. Sometime she just sealed an empty envelope and tucked it away in that trunk, and when I asked why, she said it was because she missed him and didn’t have the words to say it. I miss you, but I must have something to say, because I’m sitting here writing. I don’t think it’s a love letter; I don’t have the right kind of pen for it. This is more of a grocery list pen, dull and unexcitable.

If I told you what year it is, Arthur, you wouldn’t believe me. I can see you laughing at me now, wondering how I made it this far on my own and to be truthful, I don’t know. But I don’t want to talk about that.

I miss the strangest things. The clink of a spoon against a wooden bowl or waking you up in the morning when you really wanted to sleep in, and then you making me hold a shield to your sword in revenge. Gaius’s frown, or the sound of the city drifting up to me at night. Now there are other things that wake me, regretting dreams and coarser voices than I was used to then. I want to scoff at the idea of Camelot being the pinnacle of my young life so many years ago, but it still is now. There is nothing that offends so much as those ten years.

It would hurt you if I told you that this life you led is nothing but myth now. It would take a much longer life than the one you had to understand that you are being paid the highest of respects by being a myth at all. Your life was so extraordinary, the reign you had as king changed so many lives, these things you did and the person you were meant so much that you were immortalized in the luminescent haze of human consciousness. And in that immortalization, there are those who doubt you simply because your life seemed too brilliant, too beautiful to be real.

Of course I could tell them the truth; that you were not so tall as the stories make you out to be, that you wrinkled your nose at lamb and didn’t like tomatoes and threw things when I didn’t bring your breakfast in time. And couldn’t fit into your belt after becoming king.

But I am becoming kind in my old age and so shall not tell them anything about you. I _will_ say they have the colour of your eyes wrong. There is one researcher that insists he has evidence that the mythological figure of King Arthur had brown eyes, and I dare not tell him that your eyes were the colour of the sky on a particular Midsummer’s Eve I saw two hundred years ago. I still look for that sky today.

Now I’ve made myself upset. I’m sorry, Arthur, I said this wasn’t going to be a love letter. I think I was wrong, and I don’t think I can write anymore, so I will put this away in the very trunk I spoke of before and not open it for a while. And I do have the wrong kind of pen for it, but perhaps there’s no other kind of letter I know how to write to you.

Merlin

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!!


End file.
